Sunday, November 26, 2017

Why Abortion is (not) Immoral: a followup

This is a followup to my previous post, "A Review of 'Why Abortion is Immoral'". I want to follow up for two reasons. First, in my original post I made a serious mistake, which I want to acknowledge, and also explain why I don't think the mistake impacts the overall validity of my original argument. Second, Peter Donis introduced an interesting new wrinkle in the comments to that post, which I want to discuss at some length.

The mistake I made was claiming that Don Marquis "moved the goal posts" in his justification for why the future-of-value criterion (FOVC) does not imply the immorality of birth control. That part wasn't wrong; he does move the goal posts, just not where I said he did. What I said was that his justification required that a future-of-value be bound to a particular thing, and that this was not part of his original criterion. That was wrong. It was part of his original criterion, as commenter Publius kindly pointed out.

Here is Marquis original presentation. I've added a highlight to the part that I missed (or at least forgot about):

What primarily makes killing wrong is neither its effect on the murderer nor its effect on the victim’s friends and relatives, but its effect on the victim. The loss of one’s life is one of the greatest losses one can suffer. The loss of one’s life deprives one of all the experiences, activities, projects, and enjoyments which would otherwise have constituted one’s future. Therefore, killing someone is wrong, primarily because the killing inflicts (one of) the greatest possible losses on the victim.

He continues, but notice the subtle shift from the third to the first person:

To describe this as the loss of life can be misleading, however. The change in my biological state does not by itself make killing me wrong. The effect of the loss of my biological life is the loss to me of all those activities, projects, experiences, and enjoyments which would otherwise have constituted my future personal life. These activities, projects, experiences, and enjoyments are either valuable for their own sakes or are means to something else that is valuable for its own sake. Some parts of my future are not valued by me now, but will come to be valued by me as I grow older and as my values and capacities change. When I am killed, I am deprived both of what I now value which would have been part of my future personal life, but also what I would come to value. Therefore, when I die, I am deprived of all of the value of my future. Inflicting this loss on me is ultimately what makes killing me wrong.

He does this because he wants one of the consequences of his theory to be that killing hermits is morally wrong. The only way to do that is to measure the future value of a human life by the quality metric of the person living it. We don't want to have to find someone else to vouch for us in order to establish our own value.

Marquis continues by concluding:

This being the case, it would seem that what makes killing any adult human being prima facie seriously wrong is the loss of his other future.

This of course does not mean that the FOVC only applies to adult human beings. The form of the argument is, "what makes the killing of adult human beings wrong is FOVC, therefore FOVC is a valid criterion by which to judge the wrongness of killing, and hence it is wrong to kill anything that values its own future."

Marquis then goes on to list four redeeming qualities of FOVC which I listed in the original post. The fourth of these is:

In the fourth place, the account of the wrongness of killing defended in this essay does straightforwardly entail that it is prima facie seriously wrong to kill children and infants, for we do presume that they have futures of value.

Note the highlighted words. This are where he actually moves the goal posts. It's a subtle but crucial shift, and I think that may be why I missed it the first time around: "WE presume that THEY have futures of value." Indeed fetuses do have futures of value relative to other people's quality metrics. But Marquis has explicitly disclaimed this mode of reasoning! It is not the effect of killing on friends, family, or concerned bystanders that makes killing wrong, it's the negative impact on the victim as assessed by the victim. This is not an accident; it's the only way to save the hermits. It's also the only way to not arrive at the conclusion that euthanasia is wrong.

The problem for Marquis is that fetuses do not and cannot possibly value their own lives. To value anything you have to have a brain, and fetuses don't. And it's even worse than that: the essential ingredient for valuing things is not a brain but a mind. (This is why it's generally considered OK to kill brain-dead people and harvest their organs: they have brains, but not minds.) Newborn babies have brains, but whether nor not they have minds is debatable. In particular it's debatable whether a newborn human has more of a mind than, say, an adult chicken. In fact, if you present the question to a chicken in a form that it can understand (e.g. standing over it with butcher's knife in your hand) I'll wager it will give you some pretty definitive indications that it does indeed value its own future.

So not only does FOVC fail to save fetuses, it even fails to save newborns, at least as long as we find it acceptable to kill chickens for food. Oh well, at least the hermits can breathe a sigh of relief. (And maybe the chickens if people really start to take Marquis seriously.)

I suppose the reason I missed this is that I was trying to give Marquis the benefit of the doubt, because the theory as he actually presents it is just hopeless. The only way I can see to salvage it is to accept the moving of the goal posts, accept the premise that babies have futures-of-value because we adult humans say they do, and reason from there, at which point you run into the problem I described in the previous post, namely, that it's hard to decide where to stop the extrapolation backwards in time. If you're going to impute value all the way back to the zygote, why stop there?

Enter Peter Donis with an unusually innovative (by the standards of the abortion debate) proposal to draw the bright line at implantation rather than fertilization. Note that it is not even worth considering this unless we have already abandoned Marquis's FOVC-AABTV (As Assessed By The Victim). We have to accept, either as an axiom or as a consequence of some other criterion, that the value of a newborn infant has already crossed the threshold beyond which it is morally wrong to kill it. Then -- but only then -- we can ask: where was this threshold crossed?

The overwhelmingly most popular answer to this question (by those who accept its premises) is: at conception. But this has problems with regards to the moral status of frozen embryos, the destruction of which most people do not regard as a moral transgression on a par with murder. Peter's suggestion of drawing the line at implantation rather than conception is designed to solve that problem, along with several others that depend on events that are common before implantation but rare afterwards.

But this is only a temporary solution. The problem of the moral status of frozen embryos only exists because we actually have the technology to freeze embryos. Implantation is only a bright line because we don't yet have the technology to incubate an embryo outside of a womb. But that constraint is probably only temporary, and it would be nice to have a moral framework that was AW-ready (Artificial Womb) as well as IA- and AI-ready.

The straightforward extrapolation of Peter's implantation criterion to artificial wombs is that an embryo crosses the moral threshold when it is taken out of the freezer and implanted into an artificial womb. So let's do a thought experiment: a couple decides to have a kid, takes an embryo out of the freezer and puts it (literally!) in the oven. Let's suppose that this is early days and the technology has not yet advanced to the point where you can order a Mr-Womb machine from Amazon. You have to pay a company to rent and operate their machine.

Three months in to the process, both parents lose their jobs and are no longer able to pay the bills. What should happen?

Or suppose that the technology has advanced to the point where you can buy a Mr. Womb for $199 and conduct this entire process in the comfort and privacy of your own home. Now one day the couple's six-year-old daughter decides she wants a little sister, takes an embryo out of the freezer, pops it in and pushes the button. Some hours later, the parents wake up and are horrified to discover what little Suzie has done. They can't afford another child. If they pull the plug at this point, have they committed murder?

It's also interesting to construct similar thought experiments based on hypothetical "gestational" processes for AIs. I started writing one of those up and it turned into a very long passage (I think it could actually make a good premise for a science-fiction novel!) so I'm going to set that aside for now.

79 comments:

Very interesting follow-up! Well worth multiple comments, so this will probably be only the first of several from me. :-)

First, a general comment on the desire to have one's morality be "future proof". What, precisely, does that mean? As far as I can tell, you mean by it that whatever moral principles we choose now should still work under any hypothetical state of increased future knowledge or future technology.

I'm not sure I agree with that requirement, because future knowledge and future technology can make us aware of possibilities that we simply weren't aware of before. Since such possibilities are open-ended, I don't see how we can possibly expect to find moral principles that will handle them in the general case. I think we should be willing to allow for the possibility that something we learn in the future might require us to simply abandon a moral principle we thought was right. (Note that this is similar to the way that science must leave open the possibility that some future experiment will force us to abandon a theory we thought was right.)

Second, a general comment on human moral intuitions. Don Geddis, in response to one of your idea-ism posts, raised the possibility that human moral intuitions might not all be consistent--or, to put it more strongly, that it might not be possible to start from human moral intuitions and arrive at a consistent set of moral beliefs in reflective equilibrium. I think that's the case.

But I also think something even stronger is the case. I think it's not possible to find any single moral principle, whether idea-ism or anything else, that handles all cases, even if we pare down the set of human moral intuitions to the point where we can arrive at a consistent set of moral beliefs in reflective equilibrium. Part of the reason for this is that, as I said above with regard to future-proofing, we can't possibly be sure that we can anticipate everything that the future will throw at us.

Another reason, however, is that I don't think human values, even the "pared down" ones we get when we discard obvious outliers (e.g., the belief some religious fundamentalists have that it is justifiable to make war on people who don't share their beliefs), are all commensurable; I don't think there is a single quality metric that captures all of them. That makes it impossible to find a single moral principle that covers all cases, since any such principle would implicitly embody a single quality metric.

I make these general comments not to argue for them, but simply to make it clear where I am coming from. I'll follow up with some more specific comments separately.

You are correct that the obvious extension of my implantation "bright line" to artificial wombs is the point at which the embryo is unfrozen and placed into the artificial womb. Your thought experiments all share the same feature: what happens if that action is done without a proper anticipation of the consequences? (In one case, it's the parents not allowing for financial hardship; in the second, it's the child not understanding the implications of what she's doing, and the parents not taking proper precautions.)

My response to these cases is simple: inadvertence is no defense against moral wrongness. If in fact you are creating something it would be morally wrong to destroy when you put the embryo into the artificial womb, then that fact is independent of your state of mind. You can't get out of the obligation you incurred by saying you didn't mean to. If it's an obligation, it's an obligation, and if you can't fulfill it, you have a serious problem.

Prudent owners or renters of artificial wombs would of course take precautions against such mistakes. For example, they would take out an insurance policy before renting an artificial womb that would make the payments if they became unable to. (Prudent owners of such devices would make having such a policy a condition of being able to rent them.) They would put a lock or something similar on the artificial womb so little Suzie couldn't put an embryo in it by mistake.

Of course, this doesn't mean we must in fact be creating something it would be morally wrong to destroy when we put an embryo in the artificial womb--i.e., it doesn't tell us whether or not the bright line at implantation or its equivalent is right. But it doesn't tell us whether it's wrong either. So while I find these thought experiments interesting, I don't think they count either way towards telling us whether pulling the plug on an artificial womb with a developing embryo or fetus inside it constitutes murder.

I appreciate the shout-out from Peter! And to follow on to his comment: Of course, I do understand that you're exploring the Marquis essay / theory, and so trying to judge it on its own terms and see whether it makes sense. All that said, my own view of all morality is that it is a useful rule-of-thumb, when you don't have time for a detailed analysis, and you're looking for a quick answer about what you "should" do.

But if you're actually trying to resolve a difficult quandary, I personally would throw out all the "right / wrong" labels, and all the moral language. (You really can't get "ought" from "is".) At the end of the day, you just drop into a kind of consequential utilitarianism: what are the policy choices we have available to us, what possible future worlds do we predict based on the policy choice we make today, and which set of future worlds do we agree that we prefer? Actually do the hard work to look at what would happen under different scenarios, and choose the world you wish to live in.

I find frustrating, the typical moral reasoning process of: let's first agree on a generic moral rule; then let's find some odd corner cases that violate our intuitions; but now we are stuck with the outcome of those corner cases, because we already agreed on the rule in step #1 (before we considered the odd cases). I don't find that reasoning very compelling.

Everything is grey areas. There is no reason, a priori, to expect the universe to offer bright moral lines. Take, as a simpler example, the question about whether an entity is "alive". There are lots of easy clear cases, such as "lions" and "humans", vs. "rocks" and "ice". But you would be mistaken to think that the universe offers a bright line between "living" and "not living", even though most of the common-sense examples seem easy to categorize. I would suggest there is a similar impossible-in-principle nature to the question of "is it wrong to kill this thing?" There will always be various "things" which can be found right at the border of "maybe right, maybe wrong".

I suppose I can appreciate, at a meta-level, that the moral reasoning style of argument can be effective persuasion to many people, so I acknowledge it as a tool to effect political change. But I certainly wouldn't agree to that reasoning method, if you're actually asking the more difficult question about "what should our policies be?" (As opposed to the more practical question of "how can I get my preferred policy enacted?")

> First, a general comment on the desire to have one's morality be "future proof". What, precisely, does that mean? As far as I can tell, you mean by it that whatever moral principles we choose now should still work under any hypothetical state of increased future knowledge or future technology.

Not quite. I'm happy to restrict it to *plausible* states of technological advancement or scientific discovery. I include in these the development of AIs and AWs, and the discovery of IAs. But I think we can safely ignore, say, time travel into the past.

@Don:

> I find frustrating, the typical moral reasoning process of: let's first agree on a generic moral rule; then let's find some odd corner cases that violate our intuitions; but now we are stuck with the outcome of those corner cases, because we already agreed on the rule in step #1 (before we considered the odd cases). I don't find that reasoning very compelling.

But that's not how it works at all. You have it exactly backwards. You don't start with the rule, you start with what you want the results to be. Then you see if you can find a concise rule whose consequences include all of those results. It's not unlike the process of fitting scientific theories to data, and it's a worthwhile exercise for the exact same reason: high-fidelity data compression just turns out to be tremendously useful. Furthermore, it's useful even if you don't get it exactly right. Newtonian mechanics is wrong, but nonetheless tremendously useful.

In the case of science we're asking: can we explain why the universe behaves the way it does. In the case of ethics and morality we're asking: can we explain why people have the moral intuitions that they have. In the case of science, the ability to find those rules shows that the universe is lawful rather than random or capricious. In the case of morality, the ability to find those rules indicates that our behavior is lawful rather than random or capricious. Exhibiting lawful behavior, and dealing with entities that in turn exhibit lawful behavior, has survival value.

Put it another way: if we both have reliable models of each other's behavior then we have a much better basis for interacting productively with each other (or choosing not to interact with each other) than if we don't. For that reason alone it's worth pursuing such models.

@Ron:> We have to accept, either as an axiom or as a consequence of some other criterion, that the value of a newborn infant has already crossed the threshold beyond which it is morally wrong to kill it.

I agree with this, but I don't think it follows that the reason why a newborn infant has crossed the threshold has to be because we adult humans say its life has value. In the normal course of development, that newborn infant will become an adult human that values its own life. Up to that point, other adult humans (normally the infant's parents) are guardians of the developing person's future of value. Obviously the parents (or other guardians) can't know exactly what value the person will put on their own life, or what particular aspects of their life will be valuable to them; but that doesn't mean they can't do the best they can to put that developing person in the best possible position to decide what they value about their life once they are mature enough to do so.

In other words, bringing a newborn infant into being creates a moral obligation of guardianship. I think this is consistent with our moral intuitions. But it implies that it is not just an arbitrary choice on the part of adult humans to value the lives of newborn infants; it is a fact about them, the fact that they will become adult humans in the normal course of development. And if that is true for a newborn infant, it would also be true of a developing fetus in the womb (natural or artificial), if the "bright line at implantation" rule is correct.

@Ron:> In the case of ethics and morality we're asking: can we explain why people have the moral intuitions that they have.

But we already know the answer to that question, at least as a general statement: our moral intuitions are the result of evolution. Sure, we can still work out details, like what specific selection pressures produced particular moral intuitions, or what aspects of game theory explain why those intuitions would have evolved under those selection pressures. But that's just working out the detailed consequences of the general statement.

However, when you proposed idea-ism as a moral principle, I didn't understand you to be claiming that idea-ism explains why we have the moral intuitions we have. (If that was in fact your claim, I think it's obviously false.) I understood you to be claiming that idea-ism is the only single moral principle that captures our moral intuitions well enough to serve as a basis for a consistent morality, while still doing whatever justice to those intuitions that they deserve.

> I don't think it follows that the reason why a newborn infant has crossed the threshold has to be because we adult humans say its life has value.

Of course it doesn't. That's why I was deliberately non-committal about the reason a baby has value. Everyone agrees on that it does. And everyone agrees that uncombined sperm-and-egg doesn't have that same value.

The problem is for people who want to argue that, because a baby has value that sperm+egg does not, that there must therefore be a bright line somewhere between A and B. If you are a bright-liner, and you want to convince others to act on that basis, then it is incumbent on you to say where you think that line is and why.

But I am not a bright-liner so I don't have to say where the line is. (It is incumbent on me to explain how you get from A to B without a bright line, and I believe I have done so.)

> > can we explain why people have the moral intuitions that they have?

> But we already know the answer to that question

Sorry, I didn't phrase that well at all. I didn't mean "why" in the sense of "can we explain it in terms of physics." I meant can we reliably describe/predict (within reasonable error bounds) a person's behavior as a compact set of rules, or do we have to throw up our hands and say, "This person just does whatever the fuck they feel like whenever they feel like and there's just no way of knowing what they are going to do in any particular situation."

@Ron:> I meant can we reliably describe/predict (within reasonable error bounds) a person's behavior as a compact set of rules

That makes clear what you meant, but then I question whether what you meant falls under the heading of "morality" at all. Morality is supposed to be prescriptive, not descriptive.

Or to put it another way: if I try to derive a prescriptive rule from what you're saying, I come up with: act in accordance with moral rules R (leaving unspecified for the moment exactly which rules those are, since that's an empirical question, not a moral question) because everyone else does, and you want your actions to be predictable by them, and theirs to be predictable by you, so you can cooperate more effectively and thereby survive. (You, as an idea-ist, would probably say "and thereby meme biodiversity can increase".)

But such a prescription has a serious flaw: it leaves us stuck with our current moral intuitions as the best we can do. But our current moral intuitions might not be optimal. They didn't evolve to maximize cooperation. (They certainly didn't evolve to maximize meme biodiversity.) They evolved to maximize our inclusive genetic fitness. So by the above prescription, we are stuck with a set of moral intuitions that evolved to maximize the wrong quality metric. (Even if I am correct that there is no single "right" quality metric, that still doesn't mean maximizing inclusive genetic fitness is optimal.)

Our usual moral intuitions about morality itself don't look like this at all. Our moral intuitions about morality are that we can improve, and that we ought to improve. (Different people have different definitions of "improve", but I don't know of any moral tradition that says humans and human society are just right the way they are.) So even on the view that we ought to respect our moral intuitions, the above prescription doesn't do that.

@Ron:> (It is incumbent on me to explain how you get from A to B without a bright line, and I believe I have done so.)

Are you referring to idea-ism here? If so, I don't think it does the job, because it requires you to know how meme biodiversity is affected by various actions, and I don't see how we would know that. For example, how do we determine the impact on meme biodiversity if a pregnancy is aborted vs. being carried to term? Is it a function of how far along the pregnancy is? How?

@Ron:> The problem is for people who want to argue that, because a baby has value that sperm+egg does not, that there must therefore be a bright line somewhere between A and B.

One can adopt bright lines as a practical matter even if one doesn't believe they "really exist". We do that with plenty of things: driver's licenses, the right to vote, age of consent for marriage or sexual activity. We know these bright lines aren't "real", in the sense that being able to responsibly conduct the activity associated with them is not a binary property, it's a continuous process of development, and different people undergo that process at different rates. But we have to make a binary distinction, so we do the best we can to set a reasonable bright line.

Adopting a bright line for "having value" is the same kind of thing. Yes, there is no sharp transition between "not having value" and "having value"; but we have no way of knowing how to determine "how much value" a given embryo has in an individual case. We don't even have the option of testing for it, the way we make people take tests before getting a driver's license, for example. So if we have to make a binary distinction, we have no option but to draw a bright line somehow.

There is also an important distinction here between a "bright line" adopted by an individual person for making their individual choices, and a "bright line" adopted by a whole society for the purpose of regulating everybody's choices. As I said in a comment on the previous post in this series, even if I decided that the "bright line at implantation" rule was the right one for me personally, to guide my own decisions (or to guide what arguments I would make to a significant other or close friend), I might not be confident enough in it to want it to become the law of the land--I might think that allowing individual choice was the best (or least bad) option for society as a whole.

I'm not quite sure that your example works. In the case of abortion, you seem to be using "bright line" as a legal cliff: the entity has 0% rights prior to a specific event, and 100% rights afterwards.

But that's not even how driver's licenses work. In California, for example, you can first get a "learner's permit" -- after a certain age (15 1/2) -- which allows you to drive only while another licensed driver is a passenger in the car. Then later you are able to drive only yourself (and family members) -- but not non-family members. And then later you're a "fully licensed" driver. But yet even then, while not necessarily a matter of law, you'll find that you are unable to rent a car until after the age of 25. The "right to drive" is a series of steps, not a cliff.

Similarly, current abortion laws offer a series of rights, depending on the level of fetus development. In the early stages, the woman's choice is paramount and the fetus has few rights. By the end, it requires special extreme medical circumstances for the mother's wishes to override the fetus's right to life.

What is wrong with the current (graduated) approach? Why are you looking for a 0%/100% singular event?

@Ron: Thanks for the clarification about moral reasoning. However, it seems to me that you're confusing some different things. Sometimes you talk about attempting to find a "concise" rule. Sometimes you talk about wanting to "reliably describe/predict" behavior. And in any case you seem to think that the alternative is "random or capricious" behavior.

But it seems to me that a giant lookup table of special cases is perfectly predictable. Behavior wouldn't at all be random, and would be easily predictable. But it wouldn't, of course, be concise.

Here is where I think we disagree. I think you're searching for a concise rule, exactly because your description of "how it works at all" is not correct. The actual reason you look for a concise rule (in morality, or in science) is because you start with a smaller "training set" (say, 50 moral scenarios), and you label them with the "right" outcome (using moral intuition), and then you search for a concise rule to cover those cases, yes. But then you use that rule to infer conclusions for a much larger set of scenarios than you have yet considered explicitly.

That's why you look for a "concise" rule, and why you worry about "overfitting", etc. If it was just a matter of lawful and predictable, then you could do just fine with simply empirically gathering all the intuitive moral examples you can find, and listing them in a huge dictionary of some kind. But I think you actually want to find a concise rule, because you want to compel certain moral choices (e.g. consistent ones) in cases where, for example, intuition breaks down and we aren't sure what the results "should" be. (Or maybe where we haven't yet carefully examined the scenario.)

You're right that in some cases we can have multiple lines instead of a single one. But each line is still a bright line. There's no state that lets you gradually gain driving privileges as a continuous process. You just have multiple discrete categories (learner's permit, driver's license), each of which has bright line boundaries for legal purposes (even if we know those boundaries are arbitrary choices).

> even then, while not necessarily a matter of law, you'll find that you are unable to rent a car until after the age of 25.

Yes, but that's a private choice by the car rental company, which is not for the purpose of deciding whether it's legal for a person to drive on public roads, but for the purpose of deciding whether the company wants to take the risk of renting its vehicle to that person. That has nothing to do with rights. The right to drive does not mean the right to drive someone else's car without their consent, and any car owner, or at least any prudent one, is going to give or withhold their consent based on factors that are important to them.

> current abortion laws offer a series of rights, depending on the level of fetus development

No, current abortion "law" (I put the scare quotes around it because it's governed by Supreme Court opinions which IMO have interpreted the Constitution out of all recognition, but that's a whole other discussion) offers a series of arbitrary rules to tell States how they can regulate abortion--meaning, how they can draw the bright line that determines when abortion is legal and when it isn't. But there are still only those two categories. Given the nature of this particular thing, I'm not sure how you could have more than those two categories; what would be the equivalent of a "learner's permit" for abortion?

It's true that the various bright lines that are drawn by the various States, as a matter of public policy, are much more complicated and gerrymandered than a simple bright line at conception or implantation or birth. That doesn't make them not bright lines; it just makes it harder to judge on which side of the line particular cases fall.

Why can't it be both? Science is both. It describes the world, and also prescribes what we should do in order to achieve certain goals (except that then we call it engineering rather than science).

What science doesn't do is tell us what goals we should pursue, and how to make the trade-offs between conflicting goals. But there's no reason we can't apply the scientific method to that problem, with our moral intuitions about particular situations standing in for data.

> Our moral intuitions about morality are that we can improve, and that we ought to improve,

Sure, but that just begs the question: improve relative to what quality metric? As you yourself pointed out, there is no objectively correct answer to that question. We have to *choose*.

Just because we choose a quality metric that is fixed for all time (e.g. "Get closer to God", "Maximize the diversity of memes") does not mean that we cannot continually improve how well we perform relative to that quality metric.

> One can adopt bright lines as a practical matter even if one doesn't believe they "really exist".

Sure. And that is actually what we've done in our current legal regime with the trimester system. If you recall, this is actually what started this whole discussion: George Will wrote an essay criticizing the trimester system for being arbitrary, and I wrote a rebuttal saying essentially that this was not a valid criticism because there are no actual bright lines, and so *any* bright line you draw will be arbitrary.

> But it seems to me that a giant lookup table of special cases is perfectly predictable.

Well, yeah, it would be, but I guess I still haven't made myself clear with regard to my motives. The value is not in your behavior being predictable in principle, or predictable to God. The value is in your behavior being predictable to other humans with whom you interact. They have to make assessments about your likely behavior in order to inform their decisions. The only way they can do that is on the basis of whatever information they can glean about you between when they first encounter you and when they have to decide. There may be a giant lookup table in your brain, but that doesn't help unless the person you're interacting with can access and process that information somehow, and I don't see how that can happen. The reason lookup-table driven behavior seems arbitrary and capricious is not that it is not deterministic, but rather because there's no practical way for anyone you interact with to build a reliable predictive model of it.

> I think you actually want to find a concise rule, because you want to compel certain moral choices

Yes, all else being equal I would like to persuade everyone to adopt my quality metric, but then again, so would everyone else, so I recognize that I am unlikely to sway everyone to my side. But I still think there's substantial value in this exercise because the way that the process of assessing whether or not someone is trustworthy proceeds for a lot of people today, at least in the U.S., is that people ask: are you a Christian? And if the answer is yes then you are deemed trustworthy, and if the answer is no, then you are not (c.f. Roy Moore). There's a trustworthiness pecking order: protestants are at the top, Catholics are nowadays very close to the top (though it was not that long ago that they were much lower on the ladder), Jews are kind of in the middle, Muslims bring up the rear, and atheists are dead last because they are widely believed to have no moral compass at all (notwithstanding all the evidence to the contrary).

Completely independent of actually wanting to bend moral behavior in constructive ways, I think it would be useful for non-religious people to be able to refute the charge of not having a moral compass by actually being able to succinctly describe what their moral system is. I think that's true even if the succinct description is not 100% accurate.

"George Will wrote an essay criticizing the trimester system for being arbitrary, and I wrote a rebuttal saying essentially that this was not a valid criticism because there are no actual bright lines, and so *any* bright line you draw will be arbitrary."

I agree with this 100%. This is my view too.

"can access and process that information somehow, and I don't see how that can happen"

Ah. I guess the scenario I was imagining, was that we might all have common moral intuitions. It would be impractical if we each had a different lookup table, because then determinism wouldn't be enough to give you practical predictability.

But brains are way too complicated for most people to do any first-principle predictions anyway. The vast majority of "other mind" reasoning essentially relies on the fact that you have introspective access to your own brain. So you generally think to yourself, "if I were that person, in that circumstance, what choice would I make?" And then you run your own internal imagination, and your brain tells you what you would do, and then you copy that prediction and assign it to the person in front of you.

Many people start to do very, very poorly with "other mind" prediction, the more different the other people get from their own brain. Forget about the hard case with moral intuition. Take a less emotional one: many extroverts remain blind and confused their whole lives, to the actions and goals of introverts. Or men vs. women. Or straights vs. gays. It takes extreme effort to build a reliable model of another mind that significantly differs from your own, and most people never do that.

So I was imagining a deterministic, predictable moral intuition framework, which was shared among most people, but not necessarily consistent, or easy to summarize in a concise rule. In that way, the predictability comes from the imagination exercise of "what does my own moral intuition say in this case", and then applying it to the other person.

And the match doesn't have to be perfect. You still get practical predictability if the model of the other person is: "same as my moral intuition on thousands of cases, except for a different outcome in the specific cases of abortion, gay rights, etc." You can have a small, concise list of exceptions, even if the thousands of other cases are essentially arbitrary (but shared).

P.S. Yes, I totally get that atheists are dead last on the political ladder of trustworthiness. I'm actually an elected official in the State of California (school board). I've run a campaign, and been elected, on an actual political ballot. I know a reasonable amount about voting behavior, including the minefield of religion.

Even in California, successful politics includes not surfacing controversial issues that aren't immediately relevant to the main topic under discussion. There is no benefit to forcing voters to confront challenging differences, if the goal is actually sideways from that. The trick to successful politics is to emphasize the areas of common agreement, and proceed on those. "Tilting at windmills" is a different objective than actually trying to get stuff done. (And so: religion was not a topic of discussion in my election. But racism was!)

As for Mississippi: voting behavior is extremely tribal. Most registered Democrats would never vote for any Republican, and vis versa. (Look at Roy Moore's continuing support!) How easy is it to get elected in Mississippi if you are openly black? Gay? Female? Conscientious objector?

The idea that voters dispassionately choose the candidate who intellectually offers the best ideas, is already a fantasy. In that context, it's kind of hard for me to get too worked up about the bias against atheists. Nor am I optimistic that establishing a concise and predictable non-religious moral code would do much to move the needle in voting outcomes.

We're using "descriptive" and "prescriptive" in different ways. As I'm using the terms (I'm borrowing from Feynman here, one of his popular articles--I think it was the one about the value of science), "descriptive" means statements of the form "If you do X, Y will happen"; "prescriptive" means statements of the form "Y should happen" or "Z should not happen". Science is only descriptive with this usage; you agree, since you say science can't tell us what goals we should choose. But neither does "morality", on your view, since on your view, "morality" is just statements of the form "If you do X, Y will happen" applied to human actions. It doesn't tell you what should or should not happen.

> improve relative to what quality metric?

There is no single answer to this question. Different people, and different communities, have different quality metrics. Not all of them are compatible; not all of them are even comparable. That's why I said different people have different definitions of "improve".

> We have to *choose*.

But there is no single "we"; there is no single choice that everyone will agree to, or even agree to accept with misgivings. And I don't think there should be. To borrow from Feynman again, to have everybody using the same single quality metric would be to doom future generations to the chains of our present imagination. I think that's a bad idea.

> If you recall, this is actually what started this whole discussion: George Will wrote an essay criticizing the trimester system for being arbitrary, and I wrote a rebuttal saying essentially that this was not a valid criticism because there are no actual bright lines, and so *any* bright line you draw will be arbitrary.

I agree that just saying a certain system is arbitrary is not a valid criticism, since that will be true of any system. And as a matter of public policy, we can't always just let everyone choose their own quality metric. Even in the case of abortion post Roe v. Wade, there is still a legal bright line at birth, so people who believe that a baby isn't a full-fledged person entitled to a person's rights until some time after birth still don't have legal sanction for their belief. (AFAIK such people are very rare today, but that hasn't always been the case historically.) But I do think that enforcing a single bright line on everybody ought to be a last resort, if we absolutely have to in order to have a reasonable society at all. (For example, I would not advocate that we should let killing adult humans be legal because a few people happen to think it's ok.)

> I do think that enforcing a single bright line on everybody ought to be a last resort, if we absolutely have to in order to have a reasonable society at all.

Just to expand on this a little more, this is why I said earlier that, even if I believed a bright line at implantation was the right choice personally, I wouldn't necessarily want to make it the law of the land and thereby force the same choice on everybody. That would require a much higher level of confidence that that bright line was the right one (and I don't think I have that high a level of confidence in it).

> on your view, "morality" is just statements of the form "If you do X, Y will happen"

Huh? What did I say to give you that impression? I absolutely don't believe that.

> > > We have to *choose*.

> But there is no single "we";

Did I say anything to lead you to believe that I thought otherwise?

> there is no single choice that everyone will agree to, or even agree to accept with misgivings.

And yet we need to find a way to get along, even if that way is to start killing each other until the ones who are left manage to get along without killing each other. One of the things I personally would like is to minimize the carnage along the way.

The goal is not to have a *single* quality metric. The goal (for me) is to have the set of quality metric in active use be mutually compatible with each other.

> I would not advocate that we should let killing adult humans be legal because a few people happen to think it's ok.

I agree. But what do we do about the people who disagree? We can't just kill them without being hypocrites. I suppose we could wait for them to kill us, but I don't see that as a good solution either. Maybe we can wait for them to kill us and then hope we can kill them in self-defense first?

Or maybe we could somehow persuade them to adopt a different quality metric.

This (your first comment in this thread, in the part responding to Don):

"In the case of ethics and morality we're asking: can we explain why people have the moral intuitions that they have."

And then following up with being able to predict other people's behavior so we can interact with them. All such statements are of the form "if you do X, Y will happen", applied to human actions, as I said. None of them tell you what you should or should not want to happen; that has to be put in by hand, so to speak, in order to apply all this knowledge about human moral intuitions and modeling behavior. None of that knowledge tells you what should or should not happen; it just tells you what will or will not happen if you interact with humans in particular ways or confront humans with particular moral dilemmas.

> Did I say anything to lead you to believe that I thought otherwise?

You advocate idea-ism as a single rule. That seems to indicate that you advocate for a single "we", where "we" all accept idea-ism.

Of course, as I just commented, you also say that moral rules, presumably including idea-ism, are just describing and explaining why humans have the moral intuitions they have, not saying what moral intuitions they *should* have. If that's all idea-ism is, then I agree it doesn't imply a single "we"--but it also doesn't imply anything prescriptive at all, as I said above.

You seem to want to have it both ways: you want to say that moral rules just describe the moral intuitions we do have, but you also want to say they're prescriptive and that there is a single quality metric--idea-ism--that we *should* adopt, whether or not people actually adopt it. So maybe I'm just confused about your actual position.

> The goal (for me) is to have the set of quality metric in active use be mutually compatible with each other.

It would be nice if that were possible without a lot of carnage, but human history does not make me optimistic.

> what do we do about the people who disagree?

If they want to disagree within our society, they are breaking our laws and will be treated accordingly. If they don't like that, they can go find some other society, or find a desert island. I don't think society has an obligation to support people who do not accept a basic rule that's required to have a civil society at all.

> We can't just kill them without being hypocrites.

I don't think it's hypocritical to execute someone that you know, to a moral certainty, is a murderer and is not going to accept that murder is wrong no matter what you do. The problem is that no human society has ever actually met that standard with regard to its treatment of people suspected of murder. With the humans we actually have, I agree that the death penalty won't work.

> Or maybe we could somehow persuade them to adopt a different quality metric.

Again, it would be nice if this were possible, but human history does not make me optimistic.

I advanced the utilitarian argument for moral rules (they are useful for predicting other people's behavior) as a response to Don who said that discussing morality is pointless because it won't converge. I was suggesting a way that the discussion could be useful even if it doesn't converge. That doesn't mean I think this is the only possible benefit of discussing morality.

And yes, it's true that I have advanced idea-ism as my own personal moral compass, and I do believe that the world would be a better place if everyone adopted it. But I also recognize that this is very unlikely to happen any time soon. Despite this, I think it's useful for me to be able to point to a succinct description of my own moral compass to refute those who believe that I have no moral compass at all (and should therefore be considered a second-class citizen) because I'm an atheist.

So there are at least three purely utilitarian reasons why I think talking about this stuff is useful. I also believe that introspecting about what is important to you is useful in that it helps you to live a happier more fulfilled life. The hardest part of getting what you want is often just figuring out what it is you want.

> > what do we do about the people who disagree?

> If they want to disagree within our society...

No, I was posing the question globally. This planet is too small and technology is too far advanced for us to resolve fundamental differences by segregating ourselves into enclaves. It just won't work (c.f. North Korea, ISIS, Al Quaeda).

What do we do about someone who really believes in their heart of hearts that they are doing God's work by nuking San Francisco?

@Luke:

> If a choice now will result in less meme-habitat in one year, is it ok because the damage (or lack of … maximization?) is not immediate?

All else being equal, no. But all else is never equal when it comes to abortion. Abortions are never undertaken casually. It is always the case that failing to abort results in some significant negative consequences for the mother, otherwise she wouldn't consider it. So it's *always* a tradeoff between the interests of an existing brain and the interests of a potential future brain. There's no possible algorithm for making that tradeoff, which is why I think the right answer is to defer to the judgement of the already existing brain who is the biggest stakeholder.

> What does idea-ism look like with an obligation to maximize?

Idea-ism already has an obligation to maximize, but there is a lot more to maximizing the bio-diversity of memes than simply creating the maximum number of human brains. Human brains are a necessary but not sufficient ingredient for creating memes. North Korean prison camps, for example, are chock-full of human brains but you're not going to see a lot of art or creative writing or scientific breakthroughs coming out of them.

@Ron:> I think it's useful for me to be able to point to a succinct description of my own moral compass to refute those who believe that I have no moral compass at all (and should therefore be considered a second-class citizen) because I'm an atheist.

This I agree with wholeheartedly. I might not give quite the same description of my own moral compass that you do of yours, but I certainly would want to refute people who think I don't have one at all because I'm an agnostic. (Which functionally is the same as being an atheist, but I prefer the term "agnostic" for a variety of reasons that are too long to fit into the margin of this post.)

> there are at least three purely utilitarian reasons why I think talking about this stuff is useful

The word "utilitarian" is probably unfortunate here, since in the context of morality it names a particular moral viewpoint and even a particular quality metric within that viewpoint (which is not the same one you advocate), whereas you seem to be using it to refer to reasons you have that are purely pragmatic, not moral.

> I also believe that introspecting about what is important to you is useful in that it helps you to live a happier more fulfilled life.

I think this is also true of me, but I'm not sure it's true of everyone.

> What do we do about someone who really believes in their heart of hearts that they are doing God's work by nuking San Francisco?

Do you mean in a sane civilized world, or the one we actually have?

In a sane civilized world, at our state of technology and interconnectedness, "society" would mean the entire civilized world. Not that it all would be under one government or one set of rules for everything (I think I've already said that I believe that would be a bad idea), but there would be general agreement on some basic principles that were necessary to have a sane civilized world at all. Anyone who broke those rules would basically be exiled from the sane civilized world, and their ability to do harm would be removed. Maybe we find a desert island for them, as I said.

In the world we actually have, there is not general agreement on the basic principles that are necessary to have a sane civilized world at all. That's why we can have China sponsoring North Korea behind the scenes while publicly deploring the unfortunate situation there, and Russia supporting Iran or Syria behind the scenes while publicly deploring the unfortunate situation there. And why we can have the US meddling in all sorts of other countries while complaining when China or Russia do it.

@Ron[quote from href="https://goo.gl/cc93k">paragraph 29]>Note the highlighted words. This are where he actually moves the goal posts. It's a subtle but crucial shift, and I think that may be why I missed it the first time around: "WE presume that THEY have futures of value." Indeed fetuses do have futures of value relative to other people's quality metrics. But Marquis has explicitly disclaimed this mode of reasoning! It is not the effect of killing on friends, family, or concerned bystanders that makes killing wrong, it's the negative impact on the victim as assessed by the victim. This is not an accident; it's the only way to save the hermits. It's also the only way to not arrive at the conclusion that euthanasia is wrong.

The problem for Marquis is that fetuses do not and cannot possibly value their own lives. To value anything you have to have a brain, and fetuses don't. And it's even worse than that: the essential ingredient for valuing things is not a brain but a mind. (This is why it's generally considered OK to kill brain-dead people and harvest their organs: they have brains, but not minds.) Newborn babies have brains, but whether nor not they have minds is debatable. In particular it's debatable whether a newborn human has more of a mind than, say, an adult chicken. In fact, if you present the question to a chicken in a form that it can understand (e.g. standing over it with butcher's knife in your hand) I'll wager it will give you some pretty definitive indications that it does indeed value its own future.

So not only does FOVC fail to save fetuses, it even fails to save newborns, at least as long as we find it acceptable to kill chickens for food. Oh well, at least the hermits can breathe a sigh of relief. (And maybe the chickens if people really start to take Marquis seriously.)

47 ".. . .More precisely, the strategy involves arguing that fetuses lack a property that is essential for the value-of-a-future argument (or for any anti-abortion argument) to apply to them."

48 "One move of this sort is based upon the claim that anecessary condition of one’s future being valuable is thatone values it. Value implies a valuer. Given this onemight argue that, since fetuses cannot value their futures,their futures are not valuable to them. Hence, it does notseriously wrong them deliberately to end their lives. "

49 "This move fails, however, because . . .."

54 "Finally, Paul Bassen14 has argued that, even though theprospects of an embryo might seem to be a basis for thewrongness of abortion, an embryo cannot be a victim andtherefore cannot be wronged. An embryo cannot be avictim, he says, because it lacks sentience. His centralargument for this seems to be that, even though plants andthe permanently unconscious are alive, they clearlycannot be victims. What is the explanation of this? Bassenclaims that the explanation is that their lives consist ofmere metabolism and mere metabolism is not enough toground victimizability. Mentation is required. "

55 "The problem with this attempt to establish the absence ofvictimizability is . . .."

Perhaps after re-reading paragraphs 47 through 61 you could respond to Marquis' refutation of your arguments.

> Perhaps after re-reading paragraphs 47 through 61 you could respond to Marquis' refutation of your arguments.

I believe I already have, but to recap:

Marquis: "This move fails, however, because of some ambiguities. Let us assume that something cannot be of value unless it is valued by someone. This does not entail that my life is of no value unless it is valued by me."

Well, yeah, I agree with that. Your life has value as long as your brain is habitat for memes, or your existence provides value to other people whose brains are habitat for memes. The problem is that *Marquis* doesn't agree with this. *He* is the one who insists, as I pointed out in the post, that it is *not* the value of your life to others that makes it wrong to kill you ("What primarily makes killing wrong is neither its effect on the murderer nor its effect on the victim’s friends and relatives..."), it is the value of your future life *to you*, which requires there to be a "you". To impute "youness" to a blastocyst requires one to assume what it is that Marquis wishes to prove. It's pure circular reasoning.

Marquis: "The problem with this attempt to establish the absence of victimizability is that both plants and the permanently unconscious clearly lack what Bassen calls “prospects” or what I have called “a future life like ours.”

This has nearly the same problem, as I have also discussed at length: it requires one to assume that the thing that will eventually be capable of valuing things is the same thing as the blastocyst, but not the same thing as sperm+egg.

There's also this interesting twist with plants: humans eat plants, so it is arguable that a plant eaten by a human and incorporated into their body has a future-like-ours.

@Ron:> it is the value of your future life *to you*, which requires there to be a "you".

Marquis addresses this too, in the latter part of 49:

"Furthermore, my future can be valuable to me even if I do not value it. This is the case when a young person attempts suicide, but is rescued and goes on to significant human achievements. Such young people’s futures are ultimately valuable to them, even though such futures do not seem to be valuable to them at the moment of attempted suicide. A fetus’s future can be valuable to it in the same way."

It is true that Marquis argues earlier, in 23, that killing is wrong because of its effect on the victim: but his discussion there, and later on when he discusses cases like people who are unconscious or in a coma, makes it clear that the effect on the victim--the loss to the victim--is not a matter of what the victim thinks the loss is at the time it happens. It's the loss of the victim's future, independently of what the victim thinks about that loss at the time, or even whether the victim is capable of thinking at all.

So I don't agree that Marquis's position is that it is the value of your future life *to you* that counts, unless "to you" is interpreted very broadly. Requiring there to be a "you" at the time of the loss makes the interpretation of "to you" too narrow, at least as Marquis is expressing his position.

Yes, I get all that. The problem for Marquis is not that a blastocyst doesn't have a brain. Well, that's a problem too, but it's not his main problem. His main problem is that in order to have the blastocyst have a future-of-value but sperm+egg not, Marquis has to assume the thing which he wishes to prove, namely, that conception is the event which produces the thing which has a future-of-value. That makes his reasoning circular.

@Ron:> His main problem is that in order to have the blastocyst have a future-of-value but sperm+egg not, Marquis has to assume the thing which he wishes to prove, namely, that conception is the event which produces the thing which has a future-of-value. That makes his reasoning circular.

I don't think your objection is specifically that he assumes the thing which has a future-of-value is produced at conception. I think your objection is that his viewpoint requires that there is a sharp transition somewhere, and that somewhere has to be early enough to make practically any abortion wrong. Implantation would serve that purpose just as well as conception; but I think you would say that a sharp transition at implantation is open to the same objection that you make here about a sharp transition at conception.

> I think you would say that a sharp transition at implantation is open to the same objection that you make here about a sharp transition at conception.

Perhaps a better way to put this is: Marquis's argument requires there to be a sharp transition, but he gives no reasons why conception is that transition. When I proposed that implantation be treated as the event where the thing with a future of value is produced, I gave reasons for that; it wasn't just an arbitrary choice. But as far as I can see, Marquis does not do anything like that in his paper.

I missed this because you put your response in a different blog post than my question.

> So it's *always* a tradeoff between the interests of an existing brain and the interests of a potential future brain. There's no possible algorithm for making that tradeoff, which is why I think the right answer is to defer to the judgement of the already existing brain who is the biggest stakeholder.

How often is there an actual algorithm? That seems like a rather high standard. If one lowers it to what other moral systems actually deliver, I wonder if idea-ism then would have an answer. If not, one might question how many other places idea-ism cannot actually offer much guidance. Because life is chock-full of tradeoffs. (I suspect too many moral systems don't really acknowledge this in a way that provides anything approaching comprehensive guidance.)

> Idea-ism already has an obligation to maximize, but there is a lot more to maximizing the bio-diversity of memes than simply creating the maximum number of human brains. Human brains are a necessary but not sufficient ingredient for creating memes. North Korean prison camps, for example, are chock-full of human brains but you're not going to see a lot of art or creative writing or scientific breakthroughs coming out of them.

That's fine; I don't need an algorithm. But surely you can say something more than the above, when it comes to idea-ism's obligation to maximize and how that interfaces with abortion? If the obligation to maximize has no interesting bite (because say you're relying on people's current judgment all over the place), then one can rightly question whether it truly exists.

I'm just trying to get you to flesh out idea-ism more, here. The devil is always in the details.

@Ron>The form of the argument is, "what makes the killing of adult human beings wrong is FOVC, therefore FOVC is a valid criterion by which to judge the wrongness of killing, and hence it is wrong to kill anything that values its own future."

It's a subtle but crucial shift, and I think that may be why I missed it the first time around: "WE presume that THEY have futures of value." Indeed fetuses do have futures of value relative to other people's quality metrics. But Marquis has explicitly disclaimed this mode of reasoning! It is not the effect of killing on friends, family, or concerned bystanders that makes killing wrong, it's the negative impact on the victim as assessed by the victim.. . .

You need to read it more carefully.

The form of the argument is:1) That natural property that explains the wrongness of killing is the loss to the victim of the value of his future.2) If a being is in the category "having a valuable future like ours," then it is wrong to kill it. (see paragraph 31).

The problem for Marquis is that fetuses do not and cannot possibly value their own lives. To value anything you have to have a brain, and fetuses don't. And it's even worse than that: the essential ingredient for valuing things is not a brain but a mind. (This is why it's generally considered OK to kill brain-dead people and harvest their organs: they have brains, but not minds.)

Marquis' argument doesn't depend on the fetus valuing its own life. He brings up your argument in paragraph 48:

One move of this sort is based on the claim that a necessary condition of one's future being valuable is that one values it. Value implies a valuer. Given this one might argue that, since fetuses cannot value their futures, their futures are not valuable to them. Hence it does not seriously wrong them to deliberately end their lives. [paragraph 48]

Marquis then disproves your argument in paragraph 49:

This move fails, however, because of some ambiguities.Let us assume that something cannot be of value unless itis valued by someone. This does not entail that my life isof no value unless it is valued by me. I may think, in aperiod of despair, that my future is of no worthwhatsoever, but I may be wrong because others rightlysee value—even great value—in it. Furthermore, myfuture can be valuable to me even if I do not value it. Thisis the case when a young person attempts suicide, but isrescued and goes on to significant human achievements.Such young people’s futures are ultimately valuable tothem, even though such futures do not seem to bevaluable to them at the moment of attempted suicide. Afetus’s future can be valuable to it in the same way.Accordingly, this attempt to limit the anti-abortionargument fails.

Marquis' argument does not depend on the fetus being able to value its own life.

@Ron: >Your life has value as long as your brain is habitat for memes, or your existence provides value to other people whose brains are habitat for memes. The problem is that *Marquis* doesn't agree with this. *He* is the one who insists, as I pointed out in the post, that it is *not* the value of your life to others that makes it wrong to kill you ("What primarily makes killing wrong is neither its effect on the murderer nor its effect on the victim’s friends and relatives..."), it is the value of your future life *to you*, which requires there to be a "you". To impute "youness" to a blastocyst requires one to assume what it is that Marquis wishes to prove. It's pure circular reasoning.

This is not from your main post, but from comments. It simply restates your error.

Marquis' argument is that a fetus is in the category "having a valuable future like ours". Once a being is in that category, it is wrong to kill it.

>The problem for Marquis is not that a blastocyst doesn't have a brain. Well, that's a problem too, but it's not his main problem. His main problem is that in order to have the blastocyst have a future-of-value but sperm+egg not, Marquis has to assume the thing which he wishes to prove, namely, that conception is the event which produces the thing which has a future-of-value. That makes his reasoning circular.

A sperm fertilizing and egg is the first developmental step of an identifiable human being. Once you can identify a subject who can suffer the loss of a future of value like ours, that subject is now in the category of "having a valuable future like ours." Hence it is wrong to kill it. See paragraph 64.

Marquis anticipated and disproved your arugments 28 years before you made them.

@Ron:>Idea-ism already has an obligation to maximize, but there is a lot more to maximizing the bio-diversity of memes than simply creating the maximum number of human brains. Human brains are a necessary but not sufficient ingredient for creating memes. North Korean prison camps, for example, are chock-full of human brains but you're not going to see a lot of art or creative writing or scientific breakthroughs coming out of them.

@Ron 2015:>Idea-ism has a measure for the quality of a meme: any meme that advances the interests of memes (in general) is better than any meme that doesn't. So, for example, the "book" meme is better than the "war" meme. (Note that this criterion doesn't define a total order.)

How do "art or creative writing or scientific breakthroughs" advance the interest of memes?

@Luke:>I'm just trying to get you to flesh out idea-ism more, here. The devil is always in the details.

@Publius: "A sperm fertilizing and egg is the first developmental step of an identifiable human being." Hardly. Once you give me a separate haploid egg and haploid sperm cell, I can already "identify" the future human being, just as easily. Fertilization is of course an ordinary part of the whole developmental process (along with thousands of other future steps), but it isn't at all a necessary part of our knowledge of future identity.

"justifying that memes even exist" That's a foolish article. You ought to read that section of Dawkin's book first. His whole point is that evolution is a process that depends on certain features, which is potentially more generally than just biological DNA. Memes are (possibly) another example. Memes may or may not follow the rules of DNA evolution, that's true. But ideas obviously "exist", and can be transmitted between human via natural language communication, etc. All the silly talk about mirror neurons and looking for some physical correlate of an idea is completely irrelevant. Actually, his real mistake is this one: "it is just an analogy". That misses the whole point, which is that evolution describes a system evolving according to some specific rules. The sentence before is actually correct: "Memetics is just another way of saying that “culture evolves according to analogous laws to genetic natural selection.”" That's all that was ever claimed in the first place!

It's similar to starting with addition on natural numbers, then extending it to rationals, then reals, then complex numbers. It isn't a criticism to say that addition on complex numbers is "just an analogy" to addition on natural numbers. The point, instead, is the reverse: that "addition" is a more general concept than just the original natural number version. And evolution is more general than just biological DNA.

> Ron: Nope. I am a lone voice in the wilderness at the moment. But I have faith ;-)> > In all seriousness I am only moderately and temporarily discouraged by the demise of the Journal of Memetics. The same thing happened to AI in the late 80's and look where we are now. Figuring out how brains work is really, really hard -- quite possibly the hardest problem in the universe -- and so it is not too surprising that we haven't made a lot of progress in a mere 40 years since Dawkins coined the term "meme".

So, memetics already has a major problem: it doesn't appear to be useful scientifically, especially in comparison to other ways of describing human thinking in society.

For those who would claim that memetics is analogous to evolution by natural selection, I would ask what role human agency has, if any, in that process. Some forms of social constructivism would obliterate human agency, and arguably naturalism does as well. I reference Bruce Waller's Against Moral Responsibility, where he argues that on naturalism (which he accepts), humans cannot deserve any special praise or blame. You can still have an "as-if" agency; we can explore the difference by considering a simple scenario I recently presented Dr. Parsons over on SO:

>> Suppose that a research faculty member instructs one of her grad students to run some experiments. This grad student is of middling abilities and needs to be micromanaged. The grad student follows instructions to the letter and delivers the experiment results to his boss. She then makes a discovery which results in a Nobel Prize. Did she deserve most if not all of the credit, and her middling grad student little to none? If there is the kind of agency which TEPS would deny, yes. Otherwise, the faculty member initiated no more causal chains than her grad student and deserves no additional credit. (N.B. I doubt many grad students who contribute to Nobel Prize-winning research are well-described by this hypothetical.)

On naturalism, the professor doesn't "deserve" more credit in some inherent sense. Instead, society just chooses to apportion rewards and punishments in a way that advances its interests. The individual plays second fiddle in this scheme. Indeed, the individual isn't really more "active" than the selfish gene: both are 100% the products of their environments and 100% of their actions are the result not of themselves, but of what was done to them. Maybe this isn't a problem and maybe I've made a logic error, but I think the consequences of ideas ought to be explored, in case they match reality badly (thereby distorting it) when applied in domains where they don't belong.

> Marquis' argument does not depend on the fetus being able to value its own life.

Yes it does. It does not depend on the fetus *actually valuing* its own life, but it does depend on the fetus being *able* to value its own life.

The suicidally depressed person thinks their life has no value, but they are simply mistaken because they are suffering from depression. If they are given treatment they can be made to see that they are mistaken. So a depressed person is *able* to value their life (because they have a brain) even though they may temporarily not value it.

By way of contrast, a terminally ill person, or someone suffering from untreatable depression, may decide that their life has no value, or that the net future value of their life is less than the negative value of the pain they will have to endure in order to live it. In this case, they could very well not be mistaken, and hence euthanasia is moral (with proper safeguards to insure that the person requesting it is not suffering from treatable depression).

But a fetus cannot be mistaken about their assessment of the value of their life. A fetus *has* no assessment of the future value of its life, and cannot have such an assessment because it has no brain.

If you want to argue differently, then you have to either 1) show how a blastocyst can value its future while a sperm+egg cannot, or 2) concede that contraception is immoral.

@Luke:

> For those who would claim that memetics is analogous to evolution by natural selection, I would ask what role human agency has, if any, in that process.

It has exactly the same role that it has in DNA-based evolution. Humans have been producing artificial life forms through non-natural selection for millennia. Chihuahuas, cauliflower and beef cattle would not exist but for our meddling.

> surely you can say something more than the above, when it comes to idea-ism's obligation to maximize and how that interfaces with abortion?

Indeed I can. I could probably write a whole book about it (and some day maybe I will).

But how idea-ism "interfaces" with abortion is at root very simple: someone has to assess whether the birth of another child will be a net win or loss to the memetic ecosystem. Advancing the interests of memes is not easy. It requires not just human brains (for now) but also the right environment for those brains to develop and thrive. If it is judged that the right environment cannot be provided, then aborting a fetus before it has a chance to grow a brain can be the right thing to do.

But even better would be to widely promote the use of birth control so that this very difficult decision never needs to be made by anyone. There should be condoms available for free and without stigma in every school.

> > For those who would claim that memetics is analogous to evolution by natural selection, I would ask what role human agency has, if any, in that process.

> It has exactly the same role that it has in DNA-based evolution. Humans have been producing artificial life forms through non-natural selection for millennia. Chihuahuas, cauliflower and beef cattle would not exist but for our meddling.

Natural selection is not guided by any purpose; artificial selection is. That is a giant difference.

> But how idea-ism "interfaces" with abortion is at root very simple: someone has to assess whether the birth of another child will be a net win or loss to the memetic ecosystem. Advancing the interests of memes is not easy. It requires not just human brains (for now) but also the right environment for those brains to develop and thrive. If it is judged that the right environment cannot be provided, then aborting a fetus before it has a chance to grow a brain can be the right thing to do.

That much is obvious, but without seeing how it would actually play out, it's still incredibly abstract.

> But even better would be to widely promote the use of birth control so that this very difficult decision never needs to be made by anyone. There should be condoms available for free and without stigma in every school.

I might be in favor of that if sociological/​psychological research on what easy sex can do to people were also taught. I'm thinking of Chap Clark's Hurt: Inside the World of Today's Teenagers & Hurt 2.0—although since Clark is a Christian and Christians have stigma when it comes to writing such books, it'd be good to get a Certified Secular™ counterpart. You should want this too, if you're interested in memes. People with more psychological issues tend not to generate as many memes.

> Natural selection is not guided by any purpose; artificial selection is. That is a giant difference.

Well, yeah, but I think you missed the point. You asked what role human agency has in the evolution of memes. And the answer is: exactly the same role that it has in the evolution of genes. We have the capacity to manipulate our environments. That ability extends to the ability to manipulate both genes and memes if we choose to.

> That much is obvious, but without seeing how it would actually play out, it's still incredibly abstract.

I'm a bit nonplussed by this. It plays out by the mother deciding if the cost to her of bearing and (possibly) raising a child is more or less than the benefit of having her child brought into the world and raised in the environment it is likely to find itself in. Isn't that equally obvious?

> I might be in favor of that if sociological/​psychological research on what easy sex can do to people were also taught.

Sure. But I don't want to make sex easy. I want to make *safe* sex free of stigma, which is not quite the same thing. If someone chooses abstinence that should also be free of stigma (and one of the ways to do that is to make masturbation free of stigma, but I doubt I'd find much support for that among the pro-life crowd).

The main thing is that we must not bury our heads in the sand about the fact that the human sex drive is very strong and hard to resist. If it were easy to abstain there would be no problem. But the fact is that genes that make horny people reproduce better than those that don't, and this is particularly true among males, for whom promiscuity generally improves reproductive fitness. This is a problem that needs to be dealt with, and burying our heads in the sand is not an effective way to deal with it.

> Well, yeah, but I think you missed the point. You asked what role human agency has in the evolution of memes. And the answer is: exactly the same role that it has in the evolution of genes. We have the capacity to manipulate our environments. That ability extends to the ability to manipulate both genes and memes if we choose to.

Ummm, I'm pretty sure human agency is responsible for a much greater percentage of meme structure than gene structure. And I doubt that the theory of evolution proper has much of any role for humans. Yeah you'll have some when it comes to antibiotic resistance, but when I was a creationist, it was emphasized over and over and over and over that "evolution is purposeless". Either they were wrong or the analogy between genes and memes has a serious disanalogy.

> I'm a bit nonplussed by this. It plays out by the mother deciding if the cost to her of bearing and (possibly) raising a child is more or less than the benefit of having her child brought into the world and raised in the environment it is likely to find itself in. Isn't that equally obvious?

I am sure many pregnant women considering birth control go through that thought process, but that thought process doesn't depend on idea-ism.

> But I don't want to make sex easy. I want to make *safe* sex free of stigma, which is not quite the same thing.

According to Chap's Hurt, it pretty much is "easy" right now. That matches with my general observations of our culture. (I include places where premarital sex has lots of stigma.) Furthermore, I'm pretty sure it's a blanket ban on stigma which ensures that [safe] sex will be easy. (Contrast this to a stigma against having sex on the first date, which I have a hard time seeing as immediately terrible.)

> The main thing is that we must not bury our heads in the sand about the fact that the human sex drive is very strong and hard to resist.

I agree completely. According to a clinical psychologist I met who almost entered the Roman Catholic priesthood, the RCC at the time (this would be 30–40 years ago) didn't really admit this and thus did not arm itself well against priests' temptations toward pedophilia. In contrast, the standard in psychology was that having sex with your client meant you were fired/de-licensed, immediately. Not all stigma is bad.

That being said, according to Chap's Hurt, one of the reasons sex is so common at such young ages is actually a longing for meaningful relationship. Unlike sex, strong meaningful relationships act as a bulwark against the increasing numbers of stressors young people endure (e.g. social media, which is especially hard on girls).

> And I doubt that the theory of evolution proper has much of any role for humans.

Now that is *definitely* a separate topic! Especially in light of...

> when I was a creationist

Did you ever mention this before? Because it surprises me. What changed your mind?

> evolution is purposeless

Yes, that's true (unless you consider the local maximization of reproductive fitness a "purpose").

> Either they were wrong or the analogy between genes and memes has a serious disanalogy.

Nope. They were right, and the analogy is better than you think. The only difference is in the replication mechanism, which is more complicated for a meme than it is for a gene.

> I am sure many pregnant women considering birth control go through that thought process, but that thought process doesn't depend on idea-ism.

Idea-ism aligns pretty well with existing moral intuitions, which is not surprising because the interests of memes and human genes are generally aligned. It is only when they don't align that it starts to matter. And birth control and abortion are the canonical examples of non-aligned interests. Birth control can be beneficial to memes, but is an existential threat to genes.

> I think you might be surprised. I think most people exercise a lot less volitional control over their thought processes than they think they do.

I think my argument remains unscathed by that. (Jonathan Haidt agrees with you by the way; he predicates a good deal of his The Righteous Mind on it.)

> > when I was a creationist

> Did you ever mention this before? Because it surprises me. What changed your mind?

I thought I did. I argued about creationism online in my high school years and was convinced that evolution provides a better route to learning more about reality than creationism, even if evolution is false. I'm proof positive that internet discussions can change deep-seated beliefs.

> > Either they were wrong or the analogy between genes and memes has a serious disanalogy.

> Nope. They were right, and the analogy is better than you think. The only difference is in the replication mechanism, which is more complicated for a meme than it is for a gene.

It's fine that you think that (ideas need time to develop), but until you can actually poke reality in interesting ways with idea-ism, it's all R and no EE (of EE&R). As it turns out, it's really easy to spin up "theories" (I mean to distinguish from 'theory' used in the scientific sense, excepting M-theory); it's a lot hard to test them against reality. I myself have a difficult time doing too much with abstract systems of thought until I see some details about how they touch down in reality.

You are conflating three different things (and I am beginning to think you are doing it intentionally).

First, there is the proposition that the word "meme" denotes something meaningful about which we can have a coherent discussion. This seems to me to be self-evidently true: a meme is simply any idea that can be communicated from one data processing mechanism (which today includes both human brains and computers) to another. The words you are reading right now are (one embodiment of) memes. Books, music, paintings are all the embodiment of memes.

Then there is idea-ism, which is a theory of morality. A theory of morality is not and cannot be true or false because it is ultimately based on a quality metric, and quality metrics are not true or false. Rather they are desirable or undesirable (and even that is a subjective judgement).

Finally there is the hypothesis that memes are produced by a process of Darwinian evolution. I happen to believe this is true, but it's not as self-evident as the proposition that memes 1) are a coherent concept and 2) actually exist. But it's important to understand that idea-ism, the theory of morality, does NOT depend on this. Idea-ism only depends on the *existence* of memes, not on their Darwinian evolution. So we can have a discussion about whether or not memes arise by Darwinian evolution, and the fate of the JoM *might* have some relevance to that discussion. But that is a *different* topic. It has nothing to do with the morality of abortion.

"Finally there is the hypothesis that memes are produced by a process of Darwinian evolution."

For me, the most important and surprising conclusion from this hypothesis, is that we should expect the existence of at least some memes that are harmful for their hosts. In general, intuition suggests that a human would only believe an idea, if it is useful to them or helps them out in some way. But the Darwinian perspective allows for meme parasites, just the way genes are able to evolve parasitic organisms. All that is required is that the hosts survive long enough to spread the meme to new hosts. It isn't actually required that the meme improve the host's existence in any way. And in fact the meme could easily be deadly to the host ... it just needs to successfully spread to new hosts before that happens.

But it really depends on what you consider "harmful" because harm can only be measured relative to a quality metric. One man's harm is another man's freeing-up-of-resources. I think it's better to think of memes as being harmful to the genes that built the brains that host the memes, rather than being harmful to the hosts themselves. On this view, birth control is the canonical example of a meme whose phenotype is actively harmful (indeed an existential threat!) to the genes that built their common host.

> You are conflating three different things (and I am beginning to think you are doing it intentionally).

You might be right; it's a bit hard when you come off as being as confident in something for which your only support is the 'R'† of 'EE&map;R', as something for which you have all three letters of support. Given this apparent equality of confidence, I don't know to separate the alleged analogy to Darwinian evolution from a word which would otherwise be a [perfect?] synonym to regularly used words such as 'idea' and 'concept'.

But that only really covers your "First" and "Finally"; I don't see how I'm conflating at all when it comes to idea-ism. I simply take you at your word that you think idea-ism is a good model of reality, and expect that goodness of model to show up empirically. It's really easy to spin up models that describe reality (some people talk of "curve-fitting"); it's another thing to use those models to act better in reality than one could without the model. Surely you know this?

† I'm actually dubious that your support is 'R' instead of 'I', where I = Intuition. I generally think of 'reason' as being more directly tied to logic, noting that a crucial aspect of logic is that it never ever adds to the informational content of its premises. Logic is the opposite of speculation. Intuition, on the other hand, is crucial to speculation—including the best bleeding-edge science which is done. I'm going to side with my friend who is a faculty member at Caltech: intuition is much harder than regular logic. Allowing 'reason' to be a bit more than just 'logic', I would reassert the same.

"First, a reminder of what idea-ism is, what it claims, and what it does not. Idea-ism is the axiom that moral behavior is that which advances the interests of memes or ideas. It is important to note that idea-ism is an axiom. I can't prove it. In fact, no system of morality can be proven because morality is not a question of fact. The question of whether it is right to cut people's heads off for apostasy cannot be resolved experimentally. Morality is a matter of social choice. It is a question of what kind of world we want to try to strive for..."

"You can get access to sex-determining ultrasound in villages that don’t have clean drinking water"

@Ron:>All else being equal, no. But all else is never equal when it comes to abortion. Abortions are never undertaken casually. It is always the case that failing to abort results in some significant negative consequences for the mother, otherwise she wouldn't consider it. So it's *always* a tradeoff between the interests of an existing brain and the interests of a potential future brain. There's no possible algorithm for making that tradeoff, which is why I think the right answer is to defer to the judgement of the already existing brain who is the biggest stakeholder.

What if the woman is having an abortion as a method of sex-selecting her children? Is that ethical under idea-ism? If it is, can idea-ism expalin why boys are better hosts for memes than girls?

>> My claim is that idea-ism is the only principled (as defined above) moral theory that produces conclusions that coincide with most people's moral intuitions. (Drawing The Line: making the case for idea-ism)

> That's a claim about reality.

Ah, I see.

Yes, you're right, that is a claim about reality. But that is a claim *about* idea-ism, not a *part of* idea-ism. It's part of the argument for why people should choose idea-ism. But it's not part of idea-ism itself.

Stealing a line from your comment in "A Bug in the KJV" along the same lines:

> I thought idea-ism was supposed to be a good model of the morality of a great number of people?

No, idea-ism is a *proposal* that I hope people will adopt. One of the reasons I think people should adopt it is that it coincides well with much of their existing moral intuitions, but it's not intended to be a model (in the scientific sense) of anything.

I could advance a hypothesis that idea-ism will eventually be accepted because it is itself a meme, and so it could become part of a self-reinforcing memeplex whose reproductive fitness is higher with idea-ism as part of it than without. But that's a totally different topic.

@Publius:

> What if the woman is having an abortion as a method of sex-selecting her children? Is that ethical under idea-ism? If it is, can idea-ism expalin why boys are better hosts for memes than girls?

Sex-selection might be moral [1] if there were strong evidence that one gender is a significantly better host for memes that another. But there isn't, so it isn't. (But aborting an encephalitic fetus is moral under idea-ism.)

[1] Even if there were evidence that one gender was a better host for memes you would also have to make sure that there was no collateral damage to meme formation from sex-selection, like lots of unhappy brains of one gender unable to find mates. Brains are a necessary but not sufficient condition for meme formation. You need *happy* brains (or at least non-depressed ones).

> One of the reasons I think people should adopt [idea-ism] is that it coincides well with much of their existing moral intuitions, but it's not intended to be a model (in the scientific sense) of anything.

I guess I'm confused about the difference between

(1) "that produces conclusions that coincide with most people's moral intuitions" (2) "a good model of the morality of a great number of people"

Perhaps that is because I tend to evaluate models by whether they reproduce the phenomena and that focus obscures inner workings of the models. Is it that you think that idea-ism reaches very similar conclusions but via arbitrarily different reasoning?

> Yes, you're right, that is a claim about reality. But that is a claim *about* idea-ism, not a *part of* idea-ism. It's part of the argument for why people should choose idea-ism. But it's not part of idea-ism itself.

That's fair. But it's hard [for me] to evaluate idea-ism without seeing concrete ways it touches down in reality. That means showing where it can meaningfully influence moral judgments, instead of yielding too much to already-existing moral judgments.

It's a difference in intent or purpose. It's the difference between, "This is how things work," and "This is a choice you should make in part because it coincides to a large extent with how things already work and so it is not as radical a change is it might first appear" (though the purpose of making the choice is to change parts of how things currently work because parts of how things currently work are broken).

> But it's hard [for me] to evaluate idea-ism without seeing concrete ways it touches down in reality.

I've given lots of examples. Idea-ism leads to the conclusions that:

Abortion is moral (or at least not immoral under all circumstances).

There is no need to worry about the "rights" of frozen embryos.

Euthanasia is moral (with proper safeguards to insure that people really are make the choice freely and lucidly).

Destroying historical artifacts, depriving women of an education, and denying people the right to marry whom they choose are all immoral, even if they are done in the name of a sincerely held religious belief.

Inciting violence is immoral.

Censorship is immoral.

Harvesting organs from brain-dead people is moral.

Discriminating based on race is immoral. (But discriminating based on religion is not!)

Promulgating false ideas as if they were true is immoral.

The most important thing is that our brains are built by genes to serve *their* purposes, to advance *their* reproductive fitness. But *we* -- the things engaged in this conversation -- have the capacity to care about things that our genes do not. For example, we care about video games, but our genes don't. To the contrary, the more time we spend playing video games, the lower our reproductive fitness. In general, the higher our economic prosperity, the worse it is for our genes (the most prosperous countries have the lowest birth rates). So we have to *choose* whose interests we serve: our genes, or something else. And if we choose something else, perhaps we can choose something nobler and more powerful than video games.

>> Marquis' argument does not depend on the fetus being able to value its own life.

@Ron:>Yes it does. It does not depend on the fetus *actually valuing* its own life, but it does depend on the fetus being *able* to value its own life.

No it doesn't:

"The future of a standard fetus includes a set of experiences, projects, activities, and such which are identical with the futures of adult human beings and are identical with the futures of young children." [paragraph 30]

"This argument does not rely on the invalid inference that, since it is wrong to kill persons, it is wrong to kill potential persons also. The category that is morally central to this analysis is the category of having a valuable future like ours; it is not the category of personhood." [paragraph 31]

"Since a fetus possesses a property, the posession on which in adult human beings is sufficient to make killing an adult human being wrong, abortion is wrong." [paragraph 65]

>But a fetus cannot be mistaken about their assessment of the value of their life. A fetus *has* no assessment of the future value of its life, and cannot have such an assessment because it has no brain.

Marquis anticipates this objection in paragraph 50, "Another similar attempt to reject the anti-abortion position is based on Tooley's claim that an entity cannot possess the right to life unless it has the capacity to desire its continued existence. It follows that, since fetuses lack the conceptual capacity to desire to continue to live, they lack the right to life."

He continues in paragraph 52, "One might attempt to defend Tooley's basic claim on the grounds that, because a fetus cannot apprehend continued life as benefit, its continued life cannot be a benefit or cannot be something it has a right to or cannot be something that is in its interest. This might be defended in terms of the general proposition that, if an individual is literally incapable of caring or taking an interest in some X, then one does not have a right to X, or X is not a benefit or X is not something in one's interest."

This general proposition is undermined by counterexamples (paragraph 53). One might have a right to be treated with a certain medical procedure (being insured), even though one cannot conceive of the nature of the procedure. Persons who have been indoctrinated, or drugged, or rendered temporarily unconscious may be literally incapable of caring about or taking an interest in something that is in their interest or is something they have a right, or is something that benefits them.

"Finally, Paul Bassen has argued that . . . an embryo cannot be victim and therefore cannot be wronged. An embryo cannot be a victim, he says, because it lacks sentience. His central argument seems to be that, even though plants and permanently unconscious are alive, they clearly cannot be victims. What is the explanation of this? Bassen claims that the explanation is that their lives consist of mere metabolism and mere metabolism is not enough to ground victimizability. Mentation is required."

This is countered in paragraph 55:

"The problem with this attempt to establish the absence of victimizability is that both plants and the permanently unconscious clearly lack what Bassen calls "prospects" or what I have called 'a future like ours.' Hence, it is surely open to argue that the real reason we believe that plants and the permanently unconscious cannot be victims is that killing them cannot deprive them of a future life like ours; the real reason is not their abscence of present mentation."

Then in paragraph 61:

". . . the mentation requirement on victimizabilityis still subject to counterexamples. Suppose a severe accident renders me totally unconscious for a month, after which I recover. Surely killing me while I am unconscious victimizes me, even though I am incapable of mentation during that time. It follows that Bassen's thesis fails. Apparently, attempts to restrict the value of a future-like-ours argument so that fetuses do not fall within its scope do not succeed."

"Since a fetus possesses a property, the possession on which in adult human beings is sufficient to make killing an adult human being wrong, abortion is wrong."

> Suppose a severe accident renders me totally unconscious for a month, after which I recover. Surely killing me while I am unconscious victimizes me, even though I am incapable of mentation during that time. It follows that Bassen's thesis fails.

No, it doesn't. Note that you don't have to be unconscious for a month. It suffices simply to go to sleep.

There's a big difference between going to sleep (or being rendered temporarily unconscious by other means) and being not-conscious because you do not possess a brain: a person who goes to sleep is the *same person* before they go to sleep and after they wake up. That is not the case for a blastocyst. A blastocyst does eventually transform into a thing that "wakes up" (a baby), but, as I pointed out in my original critique, for Marquis argument to hold you have to *assume* that the thing that eventually wakes up is the "same thing" as the blastocyst (but *not* the same thing as the sperm+egg that made the blastocyst if you want to keep birth control). But that is precisely what is in dispute, so the argument is circular.

Once you come into possession of a brain that is capable of valuing things then you are allowed to take temporary excursions from consciousness (i.e. sleep) without forfeiting your right to live. But having a brain that can value things at least some of the time is a pre-requisite for Marquis's argument to apply.

> Vincent van Gogh was depressed

Yeah, that's a good point. A certain amount of pain does seem to be conducive meme formation, and actually to the general well-being of humans. We don't really seem to do all that well without something to challenge up. I guess I should have said something like, "You need brains that are not so depressed that they become dysfunctional" (though that seems kind of circular too).

I did know about Heaviside, but didn't know he was depressed. (Was he? The article you linked to didn't mention it.)

@Ron:>There's a big difference between going to sleep (or being rendered temporarily unconscious by other means) and being not-conscious because you do not possess a brain: a person who goes to sleep is the *same person* before they go to sleep and after they wake up.

Therefore you agree it is immoral to kill temporarily unconscious or sleeping people because they posseess a valuable future like ours.

> That is not the case for a blastocyst. A blastocyst does eventually transform into a thing that "wakes up" (a baby) . . .

A blastocyst is simply one stage of human development. It possesses a valuable future like ours. Hence it is immoral to kill it. The level of development is irrelevant.

> but, as I pointed out in my original critique, for Marquis argument to hold you have to *assume* that the thing that eventually wakes up is the "same thing" as the blastocyst

Why is that an assumption? Is it not the same thing? It seems obvious that it is the same thing, just at a later stage of development. Just as child grows into an adult.

> (but *not* the same thing as the sperm+egg that made the blastocyst if you want to keep birth control). But that is precisely what is in dispute, so the argument is circular.

Clearly the sperm and egg need to fuse (fertilization) and form a zygote as the first step of the development of a new, unique human.

So then . . . isn't it clear that sperm and eggs are not the same thing as a blastocyst?

> Therefore you agree it is immoral to kill temporarily unconscious or sleeping people because they posseess a valuable future like ours.

What? No, absolutely not. The reason it is immoral to kill sleeping people is that they are habitat for memes even when they are asleep.

> A blastocyst is simply one stage of human development.

So is sperm+egg.

> It seems obvious that it is the same thing, just at a later stage of development. Just as child grows into an adult.

It is equally "obvious" that sperm+egg is the same thing, just at an earlier stage of development.

> Clearly the sperm and egg need to fuse (fertilization) and form a zygote as the first step of the development of a new, unique human.

Labeling that the "first" step is totally arbitrary. Reproduction is a cycle. There is no "first" step.

> I do not see how the argument is circular at all.

It isn't circular unless you want to preserve the morality of birth control. If you concede that birth control is immoral, then the argument isn't circular (it's just based on an axiom that I do not accept, and leads to a conclusion that most people will not accept).

If you want to preserve the morality of birth control but conclude that killing a blastocyst is immoral, then you have to provide some *rationale* for why a blastocyst has a future of value, but an egg does not, and a sperm does not. Yes, a blastocyst can turn into a human being, but that process is contingent on a lot of other events. An egg can also turn into a human being contingent on merely one more event than a blastocyst. So *that event* must be somehow *special*. Why? Neither you nor Marquis have justified it. You've just insisted that "it's obvious". Well, it's not obvious, it is precisely what is in dispute.

The fact that sperm + egg are physically separate is NOT a justification for the claim that neither a sperm nor an egg has a future of value. Their physical separation is just one of the many contingencies that needs to be resolved on the path to becoming a human.

> It's the difference between, "This is how things work," and "This is a choice you should make in part because it coincides to a large extent with how things already work and so it is not as radical a change is it might first appear" (though the purpose of making the choice is to change parts of how things currently work because parts of how things currently work are broken).

What you say here sounds like it has a predictive aspect which could be falsified. Do you see it that way?

> > But it's hard [for me] to evaluate idea-ism without seeing concrete ways it touches down in reality.

> I've given lots of examples.

Ok, I should have said "concrete ways it touches down in reality and is superior to alternatives on tap". You seem to recognize this, given your parenthetical, above. So what are some examples of making things better? That is, idea-ism would say different or more articulate things than the alternatives on tap.

> So we have to *choose* whose interests we serve: our genes, or something else. And if we choose something else, perhaps we can choose something nobler and more powerful than video games.

It's interesting you bring up video games, as they seem to allow a lot of memes to exist in virtual reality. More than could live in our actual reality. If you're looking to maximize the sheer number of memes [perhaps filtered by non-violence], maybe you should want there to be more video games? Once you inject nobility into the mix, you move away from sheer quantitative measurements. But that's precisely where things get murky: concepts of 'the good' traditionally are not so simple, depend on human judgment which cannot be translated to algorithm, etc.

> What you say here sounds like it has a predictive aspect which could be falsified. Do you see it that way?

No. It might be true, but it misses the point. Quality metrics are ultimately matters of personal taste. You really have to just choose whether you believe (say) that the noblest thing a human can aspire to is to martyr themselves in the name of Allah, or something else. There is no logical argument that can resolve questions like that.

> Ok, I should have said "concrete ways it touches down in reality and is superior to alternatives on tap".

Yes, I've given lots of examples of that too.

> maybe you should want there to be more video games?

You have to take the side-effects and the collateral damage into account. At the moment, it is (with a very few notable exceptions) the *creation* of the games that is the meme-generating process, not the playing of them. Vastly more people are playing games than creating them, so at the moment it's a net loss (AFAICT).

For games that generate a net gain in meme production *when played*, yes, I'm all for having more of those. But Grand Theft Auto ain't it.

Ah, sperm+egg are a separate egg and a separate sperm, which have not combined to be a fertilized egg.

>The fact that sperm + egg are physically separate is NOT a justification for the claim that neither a sperm nor an egg has a future of value. Their physical separation is just one of the many contingencies that needs to be resolved on the path to becoming a human.,

Bullshit. You could carry the "contingencies" back to the supernova nucleosynthesis of phosphorus, which is an essential element on DNA. That "contingency" is a vacuous truth that does nothing to inform the ethical problem of abortion.

>>It seems obvious that it is the same thing, just at a later stage of development. Just as child grows into an adult.

>It is equally "obvious" that sperm+egg is the same thing, just at an earlier stage of development.

See above.

The reason why a fertilized egg, or zygote, is the first stage of human development because the combination of the sperm and egg creates a unique genetic code. The genetic code of that zygote matches the genetic code of the adult human at a later stage of development. The fertilized egg and the adult are the same individual.

Furthermore, a zygote fulfills the scientific criteria needed to establish biological life:1. Homeostasis: regulation of the internal environment to maintain a constant state; for example, sweating to reduce temperature2. Organization: being structurally composed of one or more cells – the basic units of life3. Metabolism: transformation of energy by converting chemicals and energy into cellular components (anabolism) and decomposing organic matter (catabolism). Living things require energy to maintain internal organization (homeostasis) and to produce the other phenomena associated with life.4. Growth: maintenance of a higher rate of anabolism than catabolism. A growing organism increases in size in all of its parts, rather than simply accumulating matter.5. Adaptation: the ability to change over time in response to the environment. This ability is fundamental to the process of evolution and is determined by the organism's heredity, diet, and external factors.6. Response to stimuli: a response can take many forms, from the contraction of a unicellular organism to external chemicals, to complex reactions involving all the senses of multicellular organisms. A response is often expressed by motion; for example, the leaves of a plant turning toward the sun (phototropism), and chemotaxis.7. Reproduction: the ability to produce new individual organisms, either asexually from a single parent organism or sexually from two parent organisms. [note that a zygote can reproduce itself at any time up to about 14 days after conception via twinning]

An a separate sperm or egg do not meet those criteria.

Once a zygote is created, we have a new individual -- one with a future of value like ours. Killing it is immoral.

Maybe we should decide on the ethical principles, then see if applying those principles results in one concluding that birth control is moral.

>If you want to preserve the morality of birth control but conclude that killing a blastocyst is immoral, then you have to provide some *rationale* for why a blastocyst has a future of value, but an egg does not, and a sperm does not.

See above.

>Yes, a blastocyst can turn into a human being, but that process is contingent on a lot of other events.

One key event is implantation -- in the right place. Implant in the fallopian tube --> no future of value.Never implant --> no future of value.Implant in the uterus -- this is when the woman becomes pregnant--> future of value.

>An egg can also turn into a human being contingent on merely one more event than a blastocyst. So *that event* must be somehow *special*. Why?

See above. The combination of the egg and sperm creates the unique genetic code of a new individual, who can be identified from zygote to elderly adult.

>Neither you nor Marquis have justified it. You've just insisted that "it's obvious". Well, it's not obvious, it is precisely what is in dispute.

See above. It is obvious to those versed in human repdroduction; Guttmacher himself said that it was obvious that fertilization was the first step of human repdroduction. To assert otherwise is just seeking to bicker about trivialities.

It is shorthand for what Marquis calls "sperm and an ovum together" (paragraph 64).

And since I've drawn attention to this paragraph, let me anticipate one of your objections:

> At the time of contraception, there are hundreds of millions of sperm, one (released) ovum and millions of possible combinations of all of these. There is no actual combination at all. Is the subject of the loss to be a merely possible combination? Which one?

The answer to this question is: the one that would have been created in the absence of contraception. (Isn't that obvious?)

> Ah, sperm+egg are a separate egg and a separate sperm, which have not combined to be a fertilized egg.

Correct.

> Bullshit.

Please watch your language. This is a family blog.

> You could carry the "contingencies" back to the supernova nucleosynthesis of phosphorus

Indeed you could, which is one of the reasons I reject the future-of-value criterion. I don't believe it can be made logically coherent.

> That "contingency" is a vacuous truth

No, that contingency, and all of the other analogous contingencies that lead to any state of affairs, are what reveal the untenability of the future-of-value criterion.

> The reason why a fertilized egg, or zygote, is the first stage of human development because the combination of the sperm and egg creates a unique genetic code.

Are you saying that it is the "unique genetic code" that *defines* the "thing" that (supposedly) has a future of value? Because that doesn't work either (c.f. Henrietta Lacks's cancer cells.)

> The fertilized egg and the adult are the same individual.

So are the unfertilized egg and and the sperm that will eventually fertilize it. That individual just happens to have two physically separate parts.

And yes, I know that you believe that the combining of the two parts into one part is the key event that creates the individual. But, as I have pointed out many times before, neither you nor Marquis have *justified* this. You've merely *proclaimed* it as if there were consensus on this point. But there is no consensus on this point. This point is exactly what is in dispute in the first place. It is NOT self-evident that life forms cannot have physically separate parts during some of their life cycle. Ant colonies, for example, are life forms that consist of physically separate parts for their entire life cycle.

> An a separate sperm or egg do not meet those criteria.

Really? Which criterion do they not fulfill?

> Maybe we should decide on the ethical principles, then see if applying those principles results in one concluding that birth control is moral.

And how are we going to decide on those ethical principles without testing them to see if they have outcomes that are not repugnant?

> No. It might be true, but it misses the point. Quality metrics are ultimately matters of personal taste. You really have to just choose whether you believe (say) that the noblest thing a human can aspire to is to martyr themselves in the name of Allah, or something else. There is no logical argument that can resolve questions like that.

Is there a better blog post to talk about whether the bold is in fact true?

> > Ok, I should have said "concrete ways it touches down in reality and is superior to alternatives on tap".

> Yes, I've given lots of examples of that too.

I recall you saying that idea-ism helps with the intuitions on trolley car problems, but those are a rather narrow application (unless you think of everything in utilitarian terms). What do you think is the most compelling example of superiority for the average San Franciscan?

> You have to take the side-effects and the collateral damage into account. At the moment, it is (with a very few notable exceptions) the *creation* of the games that is the meme-generating process, not the playing of them. Vastly more people are playing games than creating them, so at the moment it's a net loss (AFAICT).

True enough and we can put aside custom level creation for the moment. But your "net loss" is interesting; are you suggesting that before video games, the meme … sphere was healthier? That is, were the yesteryear analogues of current video-game players creating more memes?

> Is there a better blog post to talk about whether the bold [Quality metrics are ultimately matters of personal taste.] is in fact true?

No. But why would you doubt it? What possible objective measure of a quality metric could there be?

> What do you think is the most compelling example of superiority for the average San Franciscan?

I don't know, but I laid out my desiderata for a moral theory (I guess you could call that my meta-quality-metric) and discussed why I think idea-ism meets it better than any of the current competitors in this post.

> are you suggesting that before video games, the meme … sphere was healthier?

Well, no, because video games are not the only thing that happened at about the same time. There's this little thing called the Internet, for example, which has been a pretty big win. And a lot of the technology that goes into video games can be re-purposed to promote memes. I could not have made my movie, for example, without digital technology. I think digital technology in general has been a net win. It's certainly *capable* of being a (huge!) net win, but it depends a lot on how we choose to use it.

> No. But why would you doubt it? What possible objective measure of a quality metric could there be?

Actually I was mostly objecting to the 'personal' in "personal taste"; science tells us that the vast majority of taste comes from society. (We are much less 'autonomous' and 'individual' than we think.)

The question of subjectivism vs. objectivism in morality is another matter; I'm not even sure how to construe the former if you hold that all time-evolution of state happens via the laws of physics. (BTW, 'law' came from the moral/ethical sphere.)

> > What do you think is the most compelling example of superiority for the average San Franciscan?

> I don't know, but I laid out my desiderata for a moral theory (I guess you could call that my meta-quality-metric) and discussed why I think idea-ism meets it better than any of the current competitors in this post.

I'm afraid I just can't extract any concrete suggestion that idea-ism makes, which is superior to alternatives on tap. Maybe this is a topic better discussed in person.

> > > You have to take the side-effects and the collateral damage into account. At the moment, it is (with a very few notable exceptions) the *creation* of the games that is the meme-generating process, not the playing of them. Vastly more people are playing games than creating them, so at the moment it's a net loss (AFAICT).

> > True enough and we can put aside custom level creation for the moment. But your "net loss" is interesting; are you suggesting that before video games, the meme … sphere was healthier? That is, were the yesteryear analogues of current video-game players creating more memes?

> Well, no, because video games are not the only thing that happened at about the same time.

I'm still interested in that "net loss" claim; surely it is in reference to some superior state before the rise of video games? Maybe you just meant "in comparison to what technology now allows"?

@Publius: "The combination of the egg and sperm creates the unique genetic code of a new individual, who can be identified from zygote to elderly adult."

I know you're hoping for some kind of a bright line here, but the universe does not support your attempt.

1. A separated, not yet fertilized, sperm and egg also have a "unique genetic code" (when both are analyzed separately). The unique genetic code does not arise from combining them. At this point, you're just talking about information, and all the information is already available prior to fertilization. Nothing about the process of fertilization changes the unique genetic code, which is already determined (by the particular choice of sperm and egg) prior to fertilization.

2. With tools like CRISPR, we can modify the "unique genetic code". I don't believe anyone has done this yet, but you can certainly foresee taking a recently fertilized sperm and egg, observing some genetic defect in one of the genes, and cutting it out and repairing it during the early stages of pregnancy. It's only a matter of time (and a little bit of medical advancement). In that case, the "unique genetic code" that "began" with fertilization, would not continue. But you would be unlikely to find somehow who interpreted this medical repair as "killing" one individual (and somehow creating a new one, well after fertilization?).

3. Identical twins share a "unique genetic code". Yet they grow up into obviously distinct adults, marry different spouses, engage in different career fields, etc. Whatever a "future of value" is supposed to refer to, a "unique genetic code" cannot possibly refer to a unique future of value.

@Don:>I know you're hoping for some kind of a bright line here, but the universe does not support your attempt.

1. A separated, not yet fertilized, sperm and egg also have a "unique genetic code" . . .

2. With tools like CRISPR, we can modify the "unique genetic code".. . .

Your use of reduction misses the point.

The origin of an adult human individual can be traced backwards through the steps of human development to his zygote. One can also trace the development of a zygote forward through the steps of human development to a human adult.

An individual's genetic code is one method of identifying that person. Other methods would be ultrasound. Or visual.

It is a solved problem to identify individuals. "Hey, I see Don standing over there." "I've marked Baby A on the ultrasound picture."

If you don't think it's a solved problem, then we can just define it as the thing, material, matter, part, stuff, or corporeality that is being aborted.

A separate sperm and egg are not the same, as they are 2, not 1. Note my use of the word "invdividual," meaning one.

>> The reason why a fertilized egg, or zygote, is the first stage of human development because the combination of the sperm and egg creates a unique genetic code.@Ron:

Are you saying that it is the "unique genetic code" that *defines* the "thing" that (supposedly) has a future of value? Because that doesn't work either (c.f. Henrietta Lacks's cancer cells.)

See my response to Don. It is just one method of identifying an individual.

>> The fertilized egg and the adult are the same individual.

So are the unfertilized egg and and the sperm that will eventually fertilize it. That individual just happens to have two physically separate parts.

An individual, is by definition one distinctive person. A single, indivisible entity.

An individual cannot be in 2 parts. Hence, a separate sperm and egg are not an individual. The individual is formed when they combine into one.

And yes, I know that you believe that the combining of the two parts into one part is the key event that creates the individual.

Belief has nothing to do with it. It is evidence, experiment, and reason from which one concludes that the origin, or beginning, of a human individual is when an egg and sperm combine.

>But, as I have pointed out many times before, neither you nor Marquis have *justified* this. You've merely *proclaimed* it as if there were consensus on this point. But there is no consensus on this point.

Perhaps I assume you know more about human reproduction than you actually do. The scientific consensus is that the first step of human development is fertilization of an egg.

I am unable to find any scientific references that claim that human embrogensis begins before fertilization. Perhaps you can?

> It is NOT self-evident that life forms cannot have physically separate parts during some of their life cycle. Ant colonies, for example, are life forms that consist of physically separate parts for their entire life cycle.

That might be relevant if, say, we were talking about ants. But we're talking about humans specifically and not "life forms" in general.

The question of birth control is a sub-component of that larger debate.

You are making a claim that Marquis' ethical argument would make birth control immoral. This is not a claim that Marquis makes; in fact, he makes the opposite claim. In paragraph 64, he concludes, "Accordingly, the immorality of contraception is not entailed by the loss of a future-like-ours argument simply because there is no noarbitrarily identifiable subject of the loss in the case of contraception."

Your objection now hangs on this slender thread:>A blastocyst does eventually transform into a thing that "wakes up" (a baby), but, as I pointed out in my original critique, for Marquis argument to hold you have to *assume* that the thing that eventually wakes up is the "same thing" as the blastocyst (but *not* the same thing as the sperm+egg that made the blastocyst if you want to keep birth control).

Of the two things you mention:1) the thing that eventually wakes up is the "same thing" as the blastocyst - which clearly it is, as we can use EE&R to trace the development of any human back to the fertilization even. No assumption needed. Scientific fact.

2) but *not* the same thing as the sperm+egg that made the blastocyst - which I have justified above, as the sperm and egg are 2, and not 1. Marquis even states your argument as a possible objection, "One might attempt to avoid this problem by holding that contraception deprives the combination of sperm and ovum of a valuable future like ours." Then he disproves that objection.

3) if you want to keep birth control - yet, Marquis does keept birth control. You are objecting to a claim he doesn't even make!

All of your arguments against Marquis have been disproven.

If you truly form your opinions by evidence, logic, and reason, then you should now change your position and conclude that abortion is immoral. If not, you are not forming your opinions logically - but are simply another example of a person who proves the Identity-protective Cognition Thesis (ICT).

Did you know that the vast majority of ants are sterile? On the face of it, this would seem to be impossible. How can producing so many sterile individuals possibly be an evolutionarily stable strategy?

The answer is that ants are not organisms, they are organs. The ant *colony* is the organism, it just happens to be made of parts that are not physically connected to one another. No individual ant can reproduce. In fact, not even a mating pair of ants in isolation from the rest of the colony can successfully reproduce. (And in fact the same is true of humans.)

This idea that being "one" is a bright-line distinction from being "more-than-one" is not born out by nature any more than any other part of your argument.

> An individual cannot be in 2 parts.

Yes. they can. An individual any colony is in many parts throughout its life cycle. So there is no reason an individual human cannot be two parts for part of its life cycle.

This idea that "an individual cannot be in 2 parts" is a prejudice that we humans have because our *brains* are built in such a way that they cannot easily be separated from our bodies while continuing to function, though even our brains are separate into two halves which *can* be disconnected from each other and continue to function. When we build AIs they will almost certainly not be subject to such constraints.

> No, it's the difference between being educated and being ignorant.

Yes, that's true, but you are mistaken about which side is which.

> You are making a claim that Marquis' ethical argument would make birth control immoral. This is not a claim that Marquis makes; in fact, he makes the opposite claim.

Yes, I know, but he's *wrong* about that. The future-of-value criterion *does* logically entail the immorality of birth control.

> we can use EE&R to trace the development of any human back to the fertilization even[t].

Yes, I don't deny that. But we can also trace it backwards from there.

> 2) but *not* the same thing as the sperm+egg that made the blastocyst - which I have justified above

No, you haven't. Your "justification" rests on the *assumption* that an individual cannot consist of two physically separate components. Not only have you not justified that assumption, that assumption is demonstrably false because there are counterexamples in nature.

> How do you know an outcome is repugnant without ethical principles?

You ask people if they find the outcome repugnant. Repugnancy is a matter of taste.

@Ron: "When we build AIs they will almost certainly not be subject to such constraints."

On that subject, I really, really love the sci-fi novel Ancillary Justice (although less so, the two sequels). The main character is (or at least used to be, in flashbacks) an AI spaceship with thousands of independent humanoid units. I found the descriptions of "what it is like to be" the AI and its experiences, to be very compelling.

@Publius: "If you don't think it's a solved problem, then we can just define it as the thing, material, matter, part, stuff, or corporeality that is being aborted. A separate sperm and egg are not the same, as they are 2, not 1. Note my use of the word "invdividual," meaning one."

Now you're trying to play tricky games with language. Your first sentence is already inconsistent with your immediate next sentence.

We're talking about a "thing with a future of value" (a phrase your first sentence seems to agree with). Appealing to the definition of the word "individual" gets you nowhere. (Appealing to arbitrary definitions rarely resolves questions of truth, or value.)

If it makes you feel better, you can think of it as "there are many things with morally important futures-of-value, that happen not to be individuals".

Oh, and you seem to have forgotten to respond to this sentence from my last comment:>>I am unable to find any scientific references that claim that human embryogensis begins before fertilization. Perhaps you can?

I suspect you can't find a single scientific source that claims human ebryogenesis begins before fertilization. Whereas I can cite dozens that do make this observation, starting with Life In the Making, by Frank Guttmacher in 1933.

You like science when it supports you, but apparently ignore it when it doesn't. Tsk, tsk.

>> 2) but *not* the same thing as the sperm+egg that made the blastocyst - which I have justified above

>No, you haven't. Your "justification" rests on the *assumption* that an individual cannot consist of two physically separate components. Not only have you not justified that assumption, that assumption is demonstrably false because there are counterexamples in nature.

Oh yes I have, as other counterexamples in nature are irrelevant. The only releveant biological process is human development, which is well understood, and observed, to begin at fertilization. Humans individuals do not consist of two physically separate components at any point in their development. It's scientific fact. No assumptions at all.

Sure, you'll use motivated reasoning to respond with something lame such as "humans are ants" or "I can fanticize about something implausiable future technology in which humans are split in two" (or tunrn into ants or something). All of which are irrelevant to the facts of human devleopment.

I'm going to dance a little happy dance and go to bed now. I have Christmas parties to go to tomorrow.

Whereas you get to wake up and pour whiskey over your granola and mutter about "Saturnalia! Saturnalia!".

Even if it were simple, and it was invariably the case that one sperm and one egg combine to form one person, that would still not negate the fact that both the sperm and the egg that go on to combine are things with futures of value.

> I wrote a song to celebrate it:

Good for you. But if you want me to take you seriously you need to stop behaving like a five year old.